Marketing Strategies for K-12 and Higher Ed: Tailored Approaches for Different Audiences

Marketing for K-12 institutions and higher education differs in many ways, but both share the common goal of attracting and engaging prospective students. For K-12 schools, the focus is often on connecting with families, highlighting academic offerings, and building a sense of community. In contrast, higher ed marketing emphasizes career readiness, program variety, and the unique student experience at universities and colleges. In this blog, we dive into the strategies that work for both sectors, offering insights on how each can optimize their marketing efforts to reach their ideal audience and drive greater engagement.

For both sectors, the use of CRM systems like HubSpot can centralize marketing efforts, enabling personalized outreach, automated workflows, and streamlined communication. By creating targeted campaigns, nurturing leads through every stage of the decision-making process, and analyzing performance with real-time data, both K-12 and higher education marketers can ensure they are connecting with the right audience in the right way. In this blog, we explore how HubSpot and strategic marketing practices can drive engagement and conversion for both K-12 schools and higher education institutions.

Table of Contents

Education Marketing for K-12

1. Why is HubSpot a Game Changer for the K-12 Education Industry?
2. Solving K-12’s Biggest Challenges with HubSpot’s Unified CRM
3. Centralize and Track Engagement with HubSpot
4. Breeze AI: Smarter Content, Faster Enrollments
5. Automate Admissions with HubSpot
6. Effortless Lead Qualification
7. HubSpot Workflows for a Seamless Parent Journey
8. Make Data-Driven Decisions with Advanced Reporting
9. Case Study: Global Schools Foundation's Transformation with HubSpot CRM

Education Marketing for Higher Education

1. Why is HubSpot a game changer for Higher Education Industry?
2. Solving Higher Education's Biggest Challenges
3. Track Student Engagement
4. Personalized Student Journeys
5. Breeze AI
6. Automate Admissions
7. Qualify Leads
8. HubSpot Workflows
9. Advanced Reporting
10. Case Study: Australian Training College Boosts Efficiency and Enrollment with HubSpot

Why is HubSpot a Game Changer for the K-12 Education Industry?

K–12 schools face a growing volume of parent and student inquiries across multiple channels—email, WhatsApp, social media, phone calls, and website forms. Without a centralized system, managing these interactions efficiently becomes a challenge, leading to missed follow-ups, inconsistent communication, and enrollment struggles—especially for newer schools launching during the pandemic. Many schools also lack digital infrastructure, rely on disconnected systems, and struggle with automation, making lead management inefficient. Limited customization, frequent platform errors, and an inability to track the full student journey further complicate marketing efforts. A streamlined, all-in-one solution is essential to improve engagement, optimize admissions, and create a seamless enrollment experience.

Enter HubSpot.

HubSpot’s CRM for K-12 marketers makes a difference. By centralizing all student inquiries, automating repetitive tasks, and providing real-time insights, HubSpot helps institutions streamline the admissions process, improve engagement, and increase enrollments.

For example,

• Global Schools Group streamlined operations and scaled admissions using HubSpot’s CRM, achieving a unified system across 35 campuses. With automation, integrations, and advanced reporting, they enhanced lead management, improved decision-making, and optimized marketing, driving efficiency and growth.
• International Schools Partnership unified 50+ schools across 16 countries using HubSpot's full CRM, building 1,000+ automations to streamline operations. With support from HubSpot's Professional Services, they drove a 36% increase in leads and 18% year-on-year enrollment growth. Their global marketing teams now run localized, data-driven campaigns—all from one powerful, scalable system.
• NTUC First Campus struggled with fragmented systems and manual lead management, slowing enrollments and parent engagement. By adopting HubSpot’s full CRM suite, they unified data and automated workflows across 180+ centers. The result: a significant increase in enrollments and over 5,000 hours in productivity gains.

Solving K-12’s Biggest Challenges with HubSpot’s Unified CRM

Many schools currently operate with a patchwork of point solutions—using one tool for CRM, another for WhatsApp communication, a separate system for SMS marketing, and external vendors for ads and creatives. Each platform operates in isolation, requiring manual coordination and making it nearly impossible to stitch the data together for a complete view of the admissions journey.

This fragmented approach leads to inefficiencies, inconsistent messaging, and a lack of visibility into what's working. Admissions and marketing teams often spend more time managing tools than engaging prospective families.

Solution: HubSpot’s Unified Platform

HubSpot solves this by bringing all admissions-related activities under one roof. Schools can run paid ads, manage WhatsApp and SMS campaigns, track emails, handle phone calls, and nurture leads—all within a single CRM. With seamless integrations and real-time reporting, schools gain end-to-end visibility, automate follow-ups, and personalize communication at scale.

The result? Less time spent on tool management, more time spent connecting with families—and a much clearer picture of ROI across the entire admissions funnel.

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Track and Centralize Parent Engagement at Scale

K–12 education marketers often struggle with fragmented data and disconnected tools, making it hard to track and engage prospective families effectively. Without a centralized view of each family's interactions—be it through Instagram DMs, website visits, ad campaign clicks, or email responses—teams end up working in silos. This leads to delayed follow-ups, inconsistent messaging, and a fragmented admissions journey.

With HubSpot, you can seamlessly capture, assign, and track leads from Instagram DMs while gaining full visibility into each touchpoint a parent or guardian has with your school. See which web pages they explored, which campaigns they engaged with, emails they opened, and conversations they had across platforms. With all this data in one place, your admissions and marketing teams stay in sync—delivering timely, personalized engagement that makes families feel seen and supported throughout the enrollment process.

Breeze AI: Smarter Content, Faster Enrollments

Education marketers often face the challenge of producing high-quality, SEO-optimized content across various platforms, all while maintaining brand consistency and engaging prospective students. This process is time-consuming and resource-intensive.​

Enter Breeze AI:

• Automated Content Creation: Breeze AI's Content Agent streamlines the creation of landing pages, blogs, case studies, and podcasts by leveraging CRM data to ensure content is tailored to your audience and brand voice. 

• SEO Optimization: It crafts SEO-optimized content, enhancing visibility and attracting more prospective students. ​

• Efficiency and Consistency: By automating content generation, Breeze AI reduces the time and effort required, allowing marketers to focus on strategy while ensuring consistent messaging across all channels. ​

With Breeze AI, education marketers can efficiently produce engaging, optimized content that drives enrollment and growth.

Automate Admissions with HubSpot

Admissions teams often find themselves buried under a mountain of repetitive tasks—managing inquiries, assigning leads, sending reminders, and following up manually. These tasks can slow down the process, create delays, and leave prospective families waiting for responses. In a competitive education landscape, those delays can mean the difference between gaining or losing a future student.

That’s where HubSpot’s powerful automation comes in. It eases the administrative load by instantly responding to inquiries with pre-set email templates, intelligently routing parent and student leads to the right team members, and automatically triggering personalized follow-ups based on each family's actions and engagement. Whether a parent downloads a brochure, schedules a campus tour, or fills out an application, HubSpot ensures timely, relevant communication without your team lifting a finger.

With these crucial yet time-consuming tasks running seamlessly in the background, your admissions team can focus on what truly matters—building meaningful relationships, answering complex family queries, and guiding parents and students thoughtfully toward enrollment. The result? A smoother admissions journey, more satisfied prospective families, and higher enrollment numbers.

Effortless Lead Qualification

What if you could instantly qualify student leads based on their interests, intent, and engagement—so your admissions team spends time only on the most promising prospective families? With Vira, available on the HubSpot Marketplace, you can do exactly that—and much more.

Vira seamlessly captures family preferences and behaviors through WhatsApp conversations, then maps that valuable data directly into your HubSpot CRM. Based on the responses and engagement levels, Vira automatically segments leads—sorting high-priority prospects who are ready for meaningful conversations from those who need a bit more nurturing.

High-intent leads are flagged for immediate follow-up, ensuring your team connects with them while interest is at its peak. Meanwhile, lower-priority leads are automatically entered into personalized retargeting workflows, keeping your institution top of mind without overwhelming your counselors with manual tasks.

The result? A smarter, faster, and more effective admissions process where no opportunity slips through the cracks—and every prospective family gets the right level of attention at the right time.

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HubSpot Workflows for a Seamless Parent Journey

What if you could instantly qualify student leads based on their interests, intent, and engagement—so your admissions team spends time only on the most promising prospective parents? With Vira, available on the HubSpot Marketplace, you can do exactly that—and much more.

Vira seamlessly captures parent preferences and behaviors through WhatsApp conversations, then maps that valuable data directly into your HubSpot CRM. Based on the responses and engagement levels, Vira automatically segments leads—sorting high-priority prospects who are ready for meaningful conversations from those who need a bit more nurturing.

High-intent leads are flagged for immediate follow-up, ensuring your team connects with them while interest is at its peak. Meanwhile, lower-priority leads are automatically entered into personalized retargeting workflows, keeping your institution top of mind without overwhelming your counselors with manual tasks.

The result? A smarter, faster, and more effective admissions process where no opportunity slips through the cracks—and every prospective parent gets the right level of attention at the right time.

Make Data-Driven Decisions with Advanced Reporting

Every marketing dollar counts, especially in the competitive world of student recruitment. But without clear, actionable insights, optimizing your strategy and demonstrating ROI becomes a constant challenge. That’s where HubSpot’s powerful analytics steps in to transform the way you approach your marketing efforts.

With HubSpot, you can easily track every lead source—whether it’s organic search, paid ads, social media, email campaigns, or offline events—and monitor campaign performance and conversion rates, all from a single, intuitive dashboard. No more juggling spreadsheets or piecing together data from different platforms. You’ll gain a complete understanding of what’s truly driving inquiries, applications, and enrollments.

By visualizing your entire funnel, you can calculate the ROI of every initiative with precision, making it easier to refine your strategies, justify budget allocations, and invest in what delivers the most impact.

And if WhatsApp is part of your outreach strategy, Vira takes your reporting even further. Vira seamlessly captures and syncs WhatsApp-specific metrics—such as message reach, student engagement, and conversion outcomes—directly into HubSpot’s analytics. This means you’ll not only see how WhatsApp contributes to your pipeline but also be able to measure its effectiveness alongside your other marketing channels.

With complete visibility into your entire marketing and admissions ecosystem, you can confidently double down on what works, quickly pivot away from what doesn’t, and continuously optimize your enrollment strategy for better results and higher returns.

Case Study: Global Schools Foundation's Transformation with HubSpot CRM

Overview: Global Schools Foundation (GSF), a foundation managing over 35 campuses across 10 countries, sought a CRM solution to streamline its admissions and marketing processes. With over 100,000 students and 2,500 staff members, GSF needed a flexible and user-friendly platform to unify its operations, drive efficiency, and scale effectively.

Challenges: GSF faced complex data management issues across multiple brands and countries. They needed a CRM that could standardize processes, provide accurate data insights, and facilitate growth across their campuses.

Solution: GSF chose HubSpot CRM, utilizing its Sales and Marketing Hubs to centralize contact management, automate workflows, and generate real-time reports. HubSpot's powerful integrations with tools like WhatsApp, Facebook, and LinkedIn helped GSF optimize their outreach and engagement efforts.

Results:

• Standardized Processes: One CRM system of record for all campuses, offering a single source of truth for admissions teams.

• Improved Efficiency: Automation through workflows for lead nurturing, routing, and follow-up saved time and ensured consistent communication.

• Data-Driven Decisions: Best-in-class reporting dashboards empowered leadership to make informed strategic decisions.

• Scalable Growth: HubSpot’s flexibility and continuous innovation supported GSF’s vision to expand across more countries.

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Why Is HubSpot a Game Changer for Higher Education?

Higher education marketing is a complex puzzle—disjointed tools, siloed data, and an unpredictable student journey make it hard to connect with the right audience. Universities generate leads but struggle to convert them, often blind to where prospects drop off. Generic messaging replaces personalization, and without real-time insights, marketing teams operate in the dark. Proving ROI to stakeholders is a constant battle, while internal misalignment slows innovation.

One of the biggest challenges institutions face is managing multiple point solutions—CRMs for student data, separate systems for WhatsApp communication, SMS marketing platforms, and different vendors for ads and creatives. These tools rarely talk to each other, creating silos of data and inefficiencies. Coordinating these systems is a logistical nightmare, and stitching the data together to get a complete picture of the admissions journey is incredibly time-consuming.

That’s where HubSpot stands apart. It serves as a one-stop solution for schools to manage the entire end-to-end admissions journey. From attracting visitors and capturing leads to seamlessly integrating ads, WhatsApp, calling, and more—HubSpot brings it all under one roof. With everything connected, universities can automate workflows, track engagement across channels, and gain real-time insights into the performance of their campaigns, making it easier to prove ROI and make data-driven decisions.

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, HubSpot helps higher education institutions break free from siloed systems and fragmented data, enabling them to stay competitive and provide a personalized, seamless experience for prospective students.

For example,

• Athabasca University struggled with disconnected marketing tools and limited visibility into the student journey. By consolidating everything into HubSpot, they achieved 75% lead growth in three years, doubled conversion rates, and increased marketing-influenced leads by 100% year-over-year.
•  With fragmented tools and manual audience segmentation, Newcastle lacked a clear view of student interactions. HubSpot’s automation and SAP integration helped them boost organic traffic by 250%, increase landing page conversions by 25x, and double email open rates to 50-70%.
• A leading university struggled with automation challenges, poor lead management, and branding restrictions in its admissions process. After switching to HubSpot, it achieved a 10x increase in event registrations, a 50% boost in organic keyword rankings, and saved 2-4 hours per week through automation—leading five graduate schools to adopt the platform.  

Solving Higher Education’s Biggest Challenges with HubSpot’s Unified CRM

The higher education sector is facing increasing challenges, from declining enrollment and rising competition to fragmented student journeys and complex marketing efforts. Universities must actively attract and retain students, yet many struggle with disjointed tools and lack the visibility needed to optimize outreach. Without data-driven insights, institutions risk wasting budgets on ineffective marketing strategies.

Higher ed institutions also face disconnected communication channels—balancing emails, social media, website inquiries, and campus visits without a centralized system leads to missed follow-ups and inconsistent messaging. Additionally, complex enrollment processes and limited internal resources make it difficult to nurture prospective students efficiently, while traditional recruitment methods often fail to engage modern applicants effectively.

HubSpot addresses these challenges with a unified CRM that consolidates data, automates workflows, and enhances personalization. It serves as a one-stop solution for schools, providing everything needed to manage the entire admissions journey. From attracting visitors and capturing leads to integrating channels like ads, WhatsApp, and calling systems, HubSpot ensures that all tools and data work seamlessly together, eliminating silos and providing a complete view of the student journey.

With real-time insights, seamless integrations, and optimized campaigns, universities can improve efficiency, strengthen student engagement, and drive smarter growth—ensuring no opportunity is missed and every student receives the right level of attention at the right time.

Centralize and Track Student Engagement with HubSpot

Education marketers in higher education often face a unique set of challenges due to fragmented data and disconnected systems. From managing inquiries through social media to tracking website visits, event registrations, and email engagements, the lack of a unified system makes it nearly impossible to track prospective students effectively. With data spread across multiple platforms—whether it’s a CRM for admissions, an email marketing tool, or a social media management system—teams end up working in silos. This fragmentation leads to missed opportunities, inconsistent follow-ups, and a disjointed experience for prospective students, ultimately slowing down the conversion process.

A unified system, such as HubSpot, changes the game for higher education institutions. By consolidating all student data in one place, universities can seamlessly capture, assign, and track leads from every source. Whether prospective students are engaging with content on social media, filling out inquiry forms on the website, registering for campus tours, or attending virtual events, HubSpot provides a centralized view of every touchpoint in the student journey.

Admissions and marketing teams can see exactly which programs prospective students are exploring, which campaigns they’ve engaged with, emails they’ve opened, and what past interactions they've had with the institution—all in real time. This level of visibility empowers teams to align their outreach, ensuring that no lead is left behind and that every student receives personalized communication tailored to their interests and behaviors.

Moreover, with HubSpot’s automation, teams can trigger timely follow-ups based on the student’s stage in the journey—whether it’s sending an invitation to a campus tour or reminding them of application deadlines. This not only ensures smarter engagement but also streamlines the enrollment process, creating a more seamless, efficient experience for both prospective students and staff.

With all this data in one place, higher education institutions can boost collaboration between admissions and marketing teams, enhance student engagement, and provide a more personalized, connected experience for every prospective student, ultimately driving better enrollment outcomes.

Personalized Student Journeys with Custom Objects

For higher ed marketers, managing student journeys—from initial inquiry to final enrollment—can often feel like piecing together a puzzle. With multiple touchpoints across various platforms, it’s easy for data to become scattered, making it hard to get a clear picture of each student’s journey. HubSpot simplifies this process by offering custom objects that centralize applications, interactions, certifications, and more in one seamless CRM.

With HubSpot, every touchpoint in the student’s journey is tracked, whether it’s a website visit, an email opened, or an event registration. This unified view allows admissions teams to engage students with personalized content and timely follow-ups, ensuring no lead is lost or forgotten. HubSpot’s automated workflows handle repetitive tasks, while real-time reporting provides insights into campaign performance, helping teams optimize recruitment efforts.

By creating a frictionless path to enrollment, HubSpot enables institutions to nurture prospects more effectively, boost engagement, and drive conversions—all while simplifying the process for staff.

Breeze AI: Smarter Content, Faster Enrollments

Higher education marketers face the constant challenge of producing high-quality, SEO-optimized content that not only attracts students but also drives enrollment. In an environment where managing multiple platforms, maintaining brand consistency, and balancing storytelling with SEO demands significant time and effort, it can quickly become inefficient.

That’s where Breeze AI comes in—a powerful content engine designed to streamline and simplify the content creation process. By integrating with your CRM data, Breeze AI automates the generation of landing pages, case studies, blogs, and other marketing materials, ensuring each piece of content is personalized, engaging, and optimized for conversions.

No more guessing how to craft SEO-friendly headlines or designing visually appealing layouts manually. Breeze AI takes care of SEO, storytelling, and design, allowing your marketing team to focus on broader strategy and high-level goals. The result? Smarter content production that accelerates your growth, boosts engagement, and drives enrollment—all while maintaining brand consistency across channels.

Automate Admissions with HubSpot

Admissions teams often get bogged down in repetitive tasks—managing inquiries, manually assigning leads, and following up with students. This process can slow down the admissions cycle, create bottlenecks, and, unfortunately, increase the risk of losing prospective students who don’t receive timely responses.

HubSpot’s automation features are a game changer for admissions teams. By instantly responding to inquiries with pre-set email templates, routing leads to the right team members based on their qualifications, and triggering personalized follow-up actions based on student behaviors (e.g., downloading an application form, booking a campus tour), HubSpot eliminates the busywork.

With these administrative tasks running seamlessly in the background, your admissions team can focus on what really matters: engaging students, answering their questions, and guiding them toward enrollment. HubSpot automation ensures that no lead is left behind, helping you connect with students in a timely and efficient manner—ultimately driving higher enrollment numbers.

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Effortless Lead Qualification

What if you could instantly qualify student leads based on their interests, intent, and engagement—ensuring your admissions team focuses on the most promising prospects? In today’s competitive higher education landscape, it’s critical to engage the right students at the right time. With Vira, available on the HubSpot Marketplace, you can do exactly that.

Vira captures student preferences and behaviors through WhatsApp interactions, mapping that valuable data directly into HubSpot CRM. By leveraging these insights, Vira automatically segments leads based on their engagement level, allowing you to prioritize high-intent leads who are ready for direct follow-up. These high-priority leads get immediate attention from your team, ensuring that no student slip through the cracks.

For lower-priority leads, Vira automatically triggers retargeting workflows—keeping your institution top of mind without overwhelming your admissions team. This ensures every lead receives the right nurturing, driving better engagement and increasing the likelihood of conversion.

With Vira, higher education institutions can streamline lead qualification, improve resource allocation, and enhance the student recruitment process. Watch how Vira can transform your admissions strategy here.

 HubSpot Workflows for a Seamless Student Journey

When a prospective student fills out a form but doesn’t take the next step in the admissions journey, it’s easy to lose track of them. Instead of letting them slip through the cracks, HubSpot’s automated workflows spring into action to re-engage them. Whether it’s sending a personalized follow-up email, triggering a WhatsApp message via Vira, or retargeting them with an ad, HubSpot ensures that every interaction is timely and relevant.

As students engage with the content, workflows continue nurturing them by sending personalized information, inviting them to open house events, or reminding them of key deadlines. By automating these crucial touchpoints, your institution can maintain consistent engagement throughout the student journey—ensuring that no lead is left behind and turning more prospective students into enrolled ones.

Make Data-Driven Decisions with Advanced Reporting

Every marketing dollar counts, but without clear insights, optimizing your strategy is a challenge. With HubSpot’s powerful analytics, you can track lead sources, campaign performance, and conversion rates—all in one place. Understand what’s driving enrollments and calculate ROI with precision to refine your approach and justify budgets. If WhatsApp is part of your marketing mix, Vira enhances your reporting by tracking WhatsApp-specific metrics like reach, engagement, and conversions—seamlessly within HubSpot. With complete visibility, you can double down on what works and continuously improve your enrollment strategy.

Case Study: Australian Training Colleges Boosts Efficiency & Enrollment with HubSpot

Overview: Australian Training Colleges (ATC), a leading education and career pathways organization, sought to streamline its marketing and sales processes to improve lead management and increase student enrollments. Faced with multiple disconnected systems and a lack of accurate data insights, ATC turned to HubSpot to consolidate its efforts and drive measurable success.

Challenges:

• Fragmented Systems: ATC's sales and marketing teams were using a variety of outdated tools, which resulted in inefficiencies, inaccurate reporting, and missed opportunities.

• Manual Data Handling: Lead flow and sales forecasting were done manually via Excel, making it difficult to track performance and predict outcomes.

• Ineffective Website Engagement: Courses and offerings were not properly showcased on the website, leading to missed engagement opportunities.

Solution with HubSpot:

• All-in-One CRM: HubSpot's unified platform streamlined both marketing and sales efforts by consolidating student interactions, automating workflows, and enabling real-time insights.

• Automated Lead Nurturing: By creating buyer personas and mapping out student journeys, ATC developed tailored workflows that nurtured prospects based on their interests, behaviors, and stage in the buying cycle.

• Sales Enablement: The sales team used HubSpot's CRM to automate email follow-ups and lead assignments, increasing efficiency and allowing more time for meaningful conversations with prospective students.

Results:

• 10x Annual Lead Increase: HubSpot’s automation and personalized workflows resulted in a massive increase in qualified leads, helping ATC reach its enrollment targets.

• 400+ Email Templates: The marketing team created over 400 email templates, saving time and increasing consistency in student communication.

• 2X Website Traffic: Within the first 6 months, ATC experienced a significant increase in website traffic, driven by optimized content and personalized outreach.